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Category Archives: showcase

The Atlantic Cities has a nice portrait of Eric Fischer: Mapmaker, artist, or programmer?. If you have been following information visualization and geovisualization news online over the recent years, I bet you have come across Fischer’s work. A few examples:

See something or say something: In this piece Fischer has overlaid georeferenced tweets (blue) and georeferenced Flickr pictures (orange). White areas have been posted to both Twitter and Flickr.

Locals and tourists: In this piece Fischer has coloured georeferenced Flickr images depending on if they were taken by tourists (red) or locals (blue). Pictures whose author’s origin was ambiguous are coloured yellow.

“Ultimately, almost everything I have been making tries to take the dim, distant glimpse of the real world that we can see through data and magnify some aspect of it in an attempt to understand something about the structure of cities.”

“When the maps succeed, I think it is when they can confirm something that the viewer already knows about their neighborhood or their city, and then broaden that knowledge a little by showing how some other places that the viewer doesn’t know so well are similar or different.”
– Eric Fischer

What I like most about Fischer’s projects is that they are often crowdsourced (from Flickr or Twitter), data-heavy and employ often, not always, quite simple analysis or visualization approaches, but to great effect. In the end it’s all about the ideas behind the visualizations and Fischer doesn’t seem to be short on those.

Eric Fischer, formerly programmer at Google, is currently artist-in-residence at a San Francisco museum, where he will hopefully continue to produce interesting maps and visualizations. It’s probably indeed safe to respond to the Atlantic Cities article’s title that Fischer is all: mapmaker and artist and programmer.

From the U.S. National Park Service and Yosemite Conservancy comes this great short film about the skies above Yosemite NP. The distance to major cities and thus relative absence of light pollution makes for phantastic night skies. Astronomers and (time lapse) photographer and others take advantage of these conditions:

For best enjoyment make sure to crank up the resolution in YouTube and switch to full-screen playback.

Recently, a friend of mine pointed me to GIS-related blog that somehow had managed to fly under my radar: www.mapbrief.com by Brian Timoney. Timoney is principal of a Colorado-based consultancy, but his blog is not what you might expect when you hear ‘consultancy’.

Some articles which sprang to my eye and which will get you started on content and style you can expect:

Skobbler produces apps and maps based on OpenStreetMap (OSM) data. Under http://maps.skobbler.com they’ve released an OSM-based map. I’ve always had mixed feelings about how OSM presented their map online. While I like the project very much and on and off use OSM data in my projects, I don’t like many things about the visual style both of the map and the website used to present it.

I like the sleek interface of Skobbler’s OSM map, however:

Functionality-wise the Skobbler map offers their own map style as well as some traditional ones (they for example offer the Mapnik and the Cyclemap style), the usual search, routing (I suspect via Google or some other routing service as a standard, because there is a checkbox “switch to OSM”, which makes the functionality less user-friendly), favorite and recently visited places, editing via both JOSM and Potlatch and POI search and easy filtering.

Regarding the map quality I think Skobbler has done many things right and presents a major improvement over the standard OSM map styles: clearer and leaner colour scheme (which orientates itself a bit more towards the ‘industry standard’, I guess), less label clutter, more agreeable line widths (see for example the railway lines or some streets, above), nice choice of font style and capitalisation as well as label placement and repetition (of course, all these things are not completely without flaws).

If you’re into creativity, you may have heard about Everything is a Remix. Its premise is that many things we consider original ideas are rather derivatives or combinations of existing ideas. It all comes down to

COPY — TRANSFORM — COMBINE

Everything is a Remix is a four-part video series which digs into the creative process. I’ve just watched part 3, highly recommended:

I guess one could lament the idea that there are no original ideas (hmm, recursion? ;), on the other hand (and I think that should be the dominant view point) this notion takes off some burden you may have been carrying around with you. You do not have to be 100% original in order to be creative, simply because it is not even possible: Copy, transform, combine!

I acknowledge, it’s been rather quiet in these regions of the web. Why, you ask?

I have been rather busy with a sort-of spinoff project I pursue with two friends. After having published about the Twitter network of journalists here, here and here, I directed my interest towards politicians. With two friends, Tom Wider and Filip Zirin, I started SoMePolis.ch:

If you haven’t clicked through yet: SoMePolis aims to investigate the social media usage of members of the Swiss parliament. Swiss parliament has two chambers: the national chamber with 200 members and the chamber of states with 46 members. So, in total there are 246 potential Social Media users. On Twitter we have so far found 62 accounts which seem credibly enough to belong to Swiss MPs.

National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo presents the “world’s first large-scale spherical OLED” and what do you think they display on it? Right!

Cool! As soon as they can do that with bendable OLED panels and thus do away with the gaps in the globe’s surface, I’m sold!

On another note: While I think this is appealing and induces an appropriate “want-to-interact-with-the-globe”-kind-of-feeling, I’m still a strong believer in 2D maps for many purposes. For example, for gaining a global overview or for comparing some characteristic of, for example, Brazil and say India, a globe is just an impractical object. This is because you have to keep turning it back and forth (or, in the above case, if you are not at the controls, run back and forth or up and down) in order to check and compare the two places of interest.